1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of article remote sensing and tracking and more particularly to article sensing and tracking within a bounded zone.
2. Description of the Related Art
The personal wealth created by the post-modern economic order has resulted in an explosion of personal articles possession by individual consumers. Articles ranging from cellular telephones to handheld computers now burden the ordinary consumer in tracking the whereabouts of any given article at any given time. Tracking articles in a controlled environment such as one's home can be manageable in that a sense of urgency in locating a particular article can be minimized. However, in a remote environment such as a public facility, the sense of urgency in locating a particular article can border the chaotic.
Public facilities—especially retail stores—have invested substantial resources in combating the loss of store inventory through personal articles tracking. For many years, security tags affixed to articles have formed the basis of loss prevention in the retail setting. The advent of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has enabled personal articles tracking to expand from the loss prevention use case to more sophisticated use cases including inventory tracking and lost article location. Indeed, RFID technologies have been proposed for use in locating personal articles when misplaced or forgotten in a public facility such as a shopping mall, performance arena, and the like.
For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,271,715 to Aupperle et al. for Personal Articles Tracking, RFID tags, including conventional inventory type RFID tags, can be affixed to personal articles that are to be tracked. A tracking processor can sense the presence of the RFID tags and can register the corresponding personal articles in a registry or inventory of tracked personal articles. Once an inventory of tracked personal articles has been established, the tracking processor can actively monitor the presence of each tracked personal article to ensure the proximity of the same. When any one tracked personal article falls outside of a threshold sensing range of the tracking processor, an alert can be issued so as to prevent the loss or theft of the personal article that has fallen outside of the threshold range.
Even still, it will be understood that personal articles can be appropriately associated with more than one person. For instance, a cell phone can be permissibly associated with multiple different family members. As such, a false alert will be generated when the cell phone transfers possession from one family member to another. Likewise, in tracking a person, such as a child on a school field trip, the close proximity of the child to any one of a number of chaperones will be permissible, and as such, linking the child to a specific chaperone can be too rigid a rule. Also, tracking a personal article based only upon strict proximity to a person does not address the reality that in many cases, it is acceptable to leave a personal article in a trusted zone, but apart from the person, for instance within an office in a building or in an area of an outdoor space like a park. Thus, proximity between an individual and a tracked article alone is not a true indicator of whether or not the tracked article has been lost or misappropriated.